Felix Holt, in full Felix Holt, the Radical, novel by George Eliot, published in three volumes in 1866.

The novel is set in England in the early 1830s, at the time of agitation for passage of the Reform Bill, a measure designed to reform the electoral system in Britain. Despite his education, Felix Holt has chosen to work as an artisan, hoping to inspire his fellow workers to take charge of their own destiny. His austerity and passionate idealism are contrasted with the political ambitions of Harold Transome, who arrives home in Loamshire to claim his family’s estate and stand as a candidate for the Radicals (those who support parliamentary reform and universal suffrage). Esther, the heroine, believes herself to be the daughter of a Nonconformist minister, but she is in fact the true heir of the Transome estate. Esther falls in love with Felix but must choose between him and Transome after Felix is imprisoned for killing a man (albeit accidentally) while trying to pacify a riot. Eventually she chooses Felix and renounces her claim to the Transome legacy.

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November 22, 1819 Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, England December 22, 1880 London English Victorian novelist who developed the method of psychological analysis characteristic of modern fiction. Her major works include Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch...

any of the British parliamentary bills that became acts in 1832, 1867, and 1884–85 and that expanded the electorate for the House of Commons and rationalized the representation of that body. The first Reform Bill primarily served to transfer voting privileges from the small boroughs...

George Eliot’s next two novels are laid in England at the time of agitation for passage of the Reform Bill. In Felix Holt, the Radical, 3 vol. (1866), she drew the election riot from recollection of one she saw at Nuneaton in December 1832. The initial impulse of the book was not the political theme but the tragic character of Mrs. Transome, who was one of her greatest...